A solution to multiple problems: the origins of affirmative action in higher education around the world

ABSTRACT

How and when does affirmative action emerge in different national contexts? This paper is the first to analyze the emergence of affirmative action in higher education across national contexts. We find that three distinct clusters of affirmative action policies developed historically: (1) early nation-building projects, (2) mechanisms to attenuate social inequality in response to identity-based social movements, and (3) twenty-first century ‘indirect’ affirmative action policies. These clusters differ not only in the goals of their affirmative action policies, but also in how those policies are implemented, and the circumstances under which they emerge, as we show. The findings suggest that once provisions for underrepresented groups becomes part of the repertoire of actions universities or countries can take to solve a variety of national and university problems, affirmative action develops as a means to further a variety of organizational and national goals.

KEYWORDS:

• Diversity
• affirmative action
• comparative study
• sociology of education
• race

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Julie Reuben and Manja Klemencic for helpful comments on a draft of this paper. The authors also acknowledge funding for this research from Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 While the term ‘affirmative action’ arose in the United States during the 1960s, we use it more expansively, beyond the US context, to mean any policies that take into consideration race, ethnicity, religion, caste, or other forms of difference.

2 While recognizing that there is internal variation within countries, particularly in those without national affirmative action requirements, we highlight the general affirmative action policies that exist in each national context.

3 The Constitution of India (1950), Article III, Section 15.

4 We take as a starting point that racial categories in every society are socially constructed (Cornell and Hartmann 1998). In Brazil racial categories are particularly contested (Telles 2004). Still, affirmative action policies in Brazil take into consideration Afro-Brazilian (‘black’) identity.

5 See, the Declaration of the Decade of Roma Inclusion’s briefs, statements and reports, at http://www.romadecade.org/about-the-decade-decade-in-brief.

6 Some historians note that the term stems from an earlier period. Interior Secretary Harold L. Ickes and his aides used the concept in the 1930s when they tried to ‘insure that Public Works Administration contractors hired some percentage of black employees in areas that had an “appreciable Negro population” (Garrow 2009, 35). The term affirmative action’ also appeared in a non-racial context in the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (the Wagner Act) and was used in a racial context 10 years later, in New York state’s 1945 Law Against Discrimination (Garrow 2009, 35). These early references are generally associated with the labor market.

7 Universities in other countries, too, have implemented class-based provisions, but without an obvious ethno-racial impact or motivation. For example, since 2006 the British government requires universities charging maximum tuition to develop ‘Widening Participation’ plans; most commonly, these plans include, among other things, considerations in admissions for whether the applicant has lived in foster care or comes from a school or neighborhood that has sent few or no students to the university in the past. See https://www.offa.org.uk/access-agreements/ for examples. The Irish government, too, requires universities to expand access. Even more recently, when expanding higher education the Indonesian government required universities to hold 20% of seats for socioeconomically disadvantaged groups. We do not discuss these cases at length in this paper because they do not fit into the group-based consideration, whether implicit or explicit, of our working definition of affirmative action.

8 It is important to note, of course, that affirmative action is by no means a policy that resolves these issues. Affirmative action did not eradicate, for example, racial inequality in the United States, nor Roma exclusion in Europe.

9 The two exceptions to this pattern are the United States, where court cases have narrowed the forms of affirmative action permissible, and Sweden, where a 2006 court decision ended one university’s quota and lower admissions requirements for students with foreign-born parents (Barradas 2015).